Inside the Dysfunction at Rubio's Shrunken National Security Council

Politico

14 hours ago

The sun rises over a Royal Australian Navy submarine berthed at HMAS Stirling in Garden Island, Australia, on Jan. 21, 2021. The AUKUS agreement involving Australia, the U.S. and the United Kingdom — which the Pentagon has put under review — includes selling nuclear-powered submarines to Australia. | Yuri Ramsey/Australian Defence Force via Getty Images
Nahal Toosi is POLITICO's senior foreign affairs correspondent. She has reported on war, genocide and political chaos in a career that has taken her around the world. Her reported column, Compass, delves into the decision-making of the global national security and foreign policy establishment — and the fallout that comes from it.
When the Pentagon recently launched a review of a landmark security pact with Australia and the United Kingdom, the move blindsided many key officials elsewhere in the U.S. government.
The decision, it turns out, was a unilateral move by the Pentagon championed by its policy chief Elbridge Colby. The official goal of the review is to see if the pact, AUKUS, which involves selling nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, is in line with President Donald Trump's 'America First' agenda.
But many officials at the State Department, the White House-based National Security Council and others who are tasked with making the many-layered agreement a reality weren't told in advance that the review would happen or what its parameters were. Many of their counterparts in Canberra and London were caught off guard, too.
The episode — described to me and my colleagues Jack Detsch and Paul McLeary by three people familiar with the situation — is an example of how dysfunctional the national security policymaking process has become under Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who in early May became acting national security adviser.
Since Rubio took over the NSC, he has shrunk its staff by more than half. It now has fewer than 100 people, according to a person familiar with the NSC process. Arguably more importantly, Rubio has imposed changes to what's called 'the interagency process' — a key function of the NSC that involves coordinating policy and messaging across government agencies and departments.
That process, two people told me, is now one in which important meetings aren't held, career staffers are often in the dark about what's expected of them and some people or their institutions try to take advantage of power vacuums. I granted many of those I spoke to anonymity to discuss internal administration dynamics.
Some U.S. diplomats and other national security professionals are worried that the current structure means small crises will explode into big ones because they don't get early attention, and that key officials who deal with priority issues, such as Ukraine, are being iced out of important conversations.
One of the people familiar with the AUKUS situation said the broken process was already fueling turf fights, such as with Colby, a man known for challenging status quo thinking.
'It's Game of Thrones politics over there,' the person said.
The White House took issue with such characterizations. A White House official told me changes to the process were designed to promote the president's priorities while intentionally leaving out career staffers who may leak and endanger operations.
'The White House — and the president — has more visibility now into what the NSC is working on than ever,' the official said.
The official also downplayed the Pentagon's AUKUS review, stressing it wasn't a change in policy and that 'agencies often review the nature and scope of agreements.' Colby didn't reply to my requests for comment.
In theory, the National Security Council is a nerve center. Its staff coordinates policymaking across various parts of the government to ensure everyone is in sync, not only on what to do but also on how to publicly talk about it.
In reality, the NSC can get too big, too powerful and micromanaging. Its staffers often wind up creating policy instead of coordinating the ideas that emanate from departments and agencies. This is a common complaint about the NSC over multiple administrations. President Joe Biden's much larger NSC exercised so much power, especially on Middle East matters, that it infuriated the State Department.
When Rubio first took over as secretary of State in January, he made clear he wanted the State Department to lead on U.S. foreign policy. Trump, meanwhile, has long viewed the NSC with suspicion because some of its staffers at the time testified against him during his first impeachment. He and many of his top aides see the NSC as an exemplar of an untrustworthy government bureaucracy.
At Rubio's leaner NSC there are now far fewer meetings of the various NSC-led interagency bodies. That includes the Principals Committee (consisting mainly of Rubio and Cabinet chiefs), the Deputies Committee (usually Rubio's deputy and the No. 2s at the agencies) and, in particular, Policy Coordination Committees (NSC senior directors and officials such as assistant secretaries from across the government).
Traditionally, national security advisers give leeway to their senior directors to convene the lower-level PCC meetings, even though they may want a readout of what happened.
Under Trump, Rubio or a deputy of his has to approve whether a PCC meeting can be held, and that's often contingent on if the topic the PCC will discuss is deemed a priority of the president.
When there's a major crisis, such as the Israel-Iran war, the truly important meetings take place in the West Wing. They tend to include a handful of top Trump aides, including Rubio and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and of course, those aides often meet with Trump, the two people said. Such gatherings are sometimes outside the formal NSC process, and they are where Trump's intentions are best divined.
The White House official insisted this is perfectly normal: 'The president is the chief executive and commander-in-chief and makes his own determinations at the time and setting of his own choosing.'
The official has a point. At the end of the day, the president can choose how he wants to craft policy. And Rubio may still be adjusting the process.
But the president has only so much bandwidth and a limited number of priorities, while the changes Rubio has made so far at the NSC seem to underestimate the complexity of the challenges facing the U.S.
PCCs have previously been the place to discuss weedy topics often not on the president's radar. Those meetings can help prevent small crises from ballooning into ones that require higher-level attention. PCCs have also been a setting where proposals from lower ranks are first discussed before potentially being sent upwards.
PCC meetings can further be a diplomatic tool for the U.S. to show it cares about topics that are rarely presidential priorities but whose representatives appreciate whatever attention they get. This can be important for building relationships with countries that may be attracted to offers of friendship from U.S. rivals such as China.
By limiting PCCs and higher-level meetings only to the president's priorities, a tremendous amount of diplomacy never gets done, ideas are ignored and little fires are left to grow.
'Having fewer meetings isn't necessarily a bad thing. But you need to find the right balance, and if you cut too many people out of the loop, then it gets harder to solve problems before they turn into major crises,' said Josh Black, a former senior NSC official in the Biden administration.
A U.S. government that doesn't pay enough attention to, say, global health, could soon find a pandemic on its shores. An administration that ignores the growing extremism in a rarely prioritized Central Asian country may risk a terrorist attack. And ultimately, such an administration is likely to be more reactive than proactive on policy.
The Trump administration has said it views the NSC instead as a vehicle to implement Trump's ideas from the top down. But telling the NSC to implement an idea without first letting it vet the idea bottom up is a recipe for roadblocks.
Lawyers may point to legal constraints, or the plan may run headlong into another policy goal. And let's be real: Trump is constantly shifting his positions, confusing his staff as to what his goals actually are.
Foreign affairs analysts I spoke to pointed to Trump's determination to impose tariffs as a case study in how implementation without proper vetting and coordination can backfire. For example: America's European allies are among Trump's tariff targets. Trump also wants those allies to spend more on defense. His tariffs, however, could damage their economies, making it harder for them to increase defense spending.
A more dynamic NSC process — one that simultaneously works bottom-up and top-down — usually involves people across the government knowing what the president cares about, evaluating his ideas and their own, coordinating among each other, and producing plans that fulfill his goals without undercutting them.
The same White House official, unsurprisingly, said the administration is effectively implementing policy, noting that now even 'the White House counsel's office is embedded within the NSC and functions in unison.'
But others argued to me that the Rubio approach undercuts the administration's internal communications.
Key NSC staffers often are left off of phone calls between the president and foreign leaders, or are at times excluded from Trump's face-to-face meetings with such leaders. They often don't know if Trump has made a promise or demand until it's too late to raise flags.
The White House official cast the invitations to such conversations as being intentionally limited for operational security reasons, adding: 'Action items are always relayed.'
At the same time, the vacuum in conversations, in part due to the small number of meetings, has left staff in some agencies and departments unclear about what they can do. Others, such as Colby, are apparently willing to press forth with reviews that in a past administration would be coordinated with others.
I asked Biden administration officials how the White House would have reacted if the Pentagon in their time had launched an AUKUS review without telling other parts of the government. One said senior White House aides would have 'lost it.' Another said, 'I can't comprehend it.'
The status of the Trump administration's AUKUS review, the existence of which was first reported by the Financial Times, remains unclear.
How the administration handles revealing the results of the review will be a test.
Will the Pentagon tell other agencies and departments in advance so they can prepare their own answers to questions from worried British and Australian officials?
It might help to have an NSC meeting about it.